By MARTY LEVINE
Adriana Helbig entered the job of associate dean of the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences and the College of General Studies recently, determined to give the assistant deans the chance to create their own “student-forward” programs, she says.
As a former assistant dean herself (2015-18), she realized that the assistant deans’ daily work and student interactions put them in the best position to see what students need — and to know what their fellow faculty are dealing with.
She found the job of being assistant dean to be an “eye opening thing — the extraordinary breadth of work, the extent of student challenges and issues. You’re the mediator but you’re also the person who is able to make things happen,” when handling student problems — the main part of the job, it seemed. She heard individual students’ stories and got involved in their lives, sometimes for weeks, working with faculty, chairs, parents and other students to resolve each issue.
“I was very much on the receiving end of sometimes very dramatic problems” that students needed to solve in order to continue with their education. “I’m trying to change that narrative” for the current assistant deans, she says, by adding a focus on putting new programs in place.
On the other hand, she notes, the assistant dean experience — for this long-time music faculty member — also made her very familiar with the full scope of the Dietrich School’s offerings, including the natural sciences and social sciences. That will help to inform her new work as well.
“We’re all trained to be specialists in something,” she says of faculty. “We all have Ph.D.s. But nobody is trained as an administrator. ... I have always asked: How is that supposed to happen? It involves a lot of creative thinking.”
Now, as associate dean, she has brought the assistant deans together to devise a series of more proactive programs. She told the group: “We are going to give you carte blanche; what do you want to do?”
The first choice was to create several events focusing on artificial intelligence, given both its capabilities already employed for adventurous projects — and for plagiarism that is harder to catch — and its potential for future use and abuse. This project, “Artificial Intelligence Across the Disciplines,” will include recruiting faculty to lead small workshops each semester concerning creative use of AI in the classroom.
Helbig also is engaged in a listening tour among undergraduate studies units that are not all under her purview, from Advising and Student Records to Student Support Services and Online Learning. “My goal is to bring everyone together in this post-pandemic spirit and to show my support to all these units,” as well as to learn about their needs and aim to ensure there is enough in the budget to support them.
“After the pandemic, how do you really bring all these people together and make them feel that we are all on the same path?” she asks. She also notes that enrollments are trending up in the humanities and that many more humanities students are double majors in the sciences.
“What happened during the pandemic that is responsible for that shift” she asks, “and is this University ready to deal with that?”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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